Studying fresh impacts not only helps researchers peek at freshly exposed dirt on Mars, which may have once been habitable, but also helps assess how much risk Earth might face from small yet dangerous space rocks.

Below is a zoomed-out image of one asteroid strike that was photographed just a few months ago, and it shows the giant black stain the event left behind:

The large and circular dark stain is roughly 650 feet (200 meters) from top to bottom, or about the length of a 60-story skyscraper lying on its side, and the central impact crater is roughly a few feet or meters across. It formed sometime between January 2014 and August 2016, so it's pretty fresh.

"[B]ecause Mars is so dusty (and there is wind there), all of that darker subsurface material was excavated and then billowed around the impact and downwind," Ari Espinoza, a HiRISE media team member, told Business Insider in an email.

"Think of dropping a tennis ball onto a mound of very fine powder," Espinoza said: "you'll see the powder billow about and get everywhere, even though the tennis ball isn't very large by comparison."

The HiRISE camera is powerful enough to resolve objects just 31 inches (80 centimeters) across, so it's worth zooming in to see the detail of the impact crater.

Amid the billow and streaks of fresh dirt, you can see a cluster of small craters, which may indicate the space rock broke up a little bit on its way toward the Martian surface — striking it like buckshot: